


Omnia Mutantur

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Community: angst_bingo, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-21
Updated: 2013-11-21
Packaged: 2018-01-02 05:18:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1052959
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How do you get 'angst' out of 'hookers'?  By writing a terrible AU.  \o/  Follows <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/412509"> Altihex Glow </a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Omnia Mutantur

He’d seen a bit of graffiti once, scratched onto a support beam in the steam tunnels: ‘Everything changes. For the worse.’ 

It was the truth of the gutters, finally written down. Not clever, not witty, but the sheer weight of reality had etched it into Drift’s memory. Things change and never for the better.

Gasket was gone, dead, the old crew scattered because the center of them, their core, their spark, had died.  Drift had tried to run into them again, but the once or twice he’d found them, they’d recoiled from him, a known fugitive, a murderer, endangering them just by proximity. 

He couldn’t blame them. Or, well, he shouldn’t blame them, but he did: he couldn’t help the simmering anger at how they’d turned, how all those times they’d swapped things they’d scrounged, all the times they’d shared out tiny rations of fuel, had apparently meant nothing.

They _had_ meant nothing, Drift thought. He’d been the fool who’d thought differently.  Whole thing did him a favor, really, showing him how friendship was fake, just a little ruse to someone to use someone else. 

Gasket had become hazy and indistinct to him now, just a warm glow from better times, that he knew wouldn’t happen again.  He could remember the brassy facial plating, the earnest blue optics, a hint of a smile, his vibrant laugh: small things, tiny details, split seconds of time, but never as a whole, never as Gasket. Bits of him, like Gasket was already dismembered even in his memory, never to be put back together again.

Not that Gasket would have anything to do with him anymore. Killer, fugitive, and now…whore.

Hiding in plain sight, really. It had been desperation, the first time, starvation and just enough despair that even though his brain told him the possibility that the mech talking to him would take him somewhere just to kill him or syphon him or worse, he hadn’t cared.

Still didn’t. Death, he could handle. Death he’d take if it came to that. It hadn’t really been much of a gold-star life, after all.  But capture, prison, to live life in a tiny box of a cell, without freedom or privacy or anything seemed unendurable. He knew mechs who didn’t mind getting arrested, thought it was actually a square deal for when a mech got too hard on his luck: safe place to sleep, regular rations of fuel. But he knew what he’d be facing was worse: killing Security mechs?  No easy revolving door for him. He’d get spark extraction, for sure, severed from his body, from being able to see and smell and taste and touch.   He couldn’t do it, couldn’t imagine himself in a place where he was locked in with his thoughts and…nothing.

Anything was better than that: even this.  At least he still had a body to be sold.  And the Red Zone was Security mech free: they took their cut and stayed away, unofficially officially ignoring the presence of half a dozen other crimes that happened here as well. But it was as safe as Drift could get, right now, safe from the law.

Not safe from his past, though.

Because he could swear he recognized that mech, the armor so white it seemed to give off a hazy glow, the sleek flightpanels swept back behind the shoulders.  It was a memory thick with Gasket, too, that one day, that one festival, where the desire to see and know something of the world that strode above them had been too much.

That whole day, that whole night, had been too much, really, and he’d scurried back to the gutters, like a creature fleeing something so magnificently good—too good for him—that it was frightening, reminding him only of his smallness and dirtiness. 

What the frag was he doing down here, anyway? 

Drift wasn’t going to ask: for the first time he felt a flicker of shame, of not wanting to be seen like this, doing this.  But it was too late, because those sun-gold optics found his, and the whole face had lit up in bright recognition, the mech crossing over from the clump of mechs he’d been talking with. “Drift!” the jet said, his voice almost the peal of bells in this dark, close place. 

“Yeah,” Drift said, stepping back, noticing all too well the sudden swivel of heads toward him, feeling the triwave mark of a buymech almost burning on his armor. 

And before he could stop it, before he even knew it was going to happen, he found himself swept into the jet’s arms, the sleek face tucking itself against his shoulder.  “I’ve thought of you!” Wing said, his voice gusting air into Drift’s throat.  “I wondered—always—where you’d gone.”

Drift gave a miserable shrug, not knowing what to do with his own hands. “Now you know,” he said, flatly, clumsily.

Wing pulled away, his hands still on the heads of Drift’s spaulders, studying Drift’s face.  “You’re not happy?”

Drift felt his face pull into a scowl. “Would you be?”

The gold optics blinked, almost hurt, before the jet regrouped. “Can I help?” 

The offer was so sudden, and so sincere, it hit Drift almost like a blow, a cold-cocked sympathy he didn’t see coming. “…no,” he said, but even his own audio picked up the uncertainty, the desperate, faint wish there was something Wing could do, haul him out of this pit he’d flung himself into by his own mistakes.   

“Drift,” Wing said, and he reached down, taking Drift’s hand. Drift could feel the sleek finger plates against his own gritty and dented ones, the armor glossy and charcoal grey against his scraped matte black. It was like every last iota of difference between their worlds was right here, squeezed in their intertwined hands. “I have friends, the Circle. We can help.” 

“We.” It was the only word Drift heard, his optics flicking over to the mechs Wing had been talking to.  They were all like Wing, sleek and shiny and moving with a slow self-assurance that was out of place down here. 

Wing gave an earnest nod, and Drift registered, suddenly, that there was something different about the jet, some indefinable shift, a sort of dancing shadow behind his optics that seemed like the living light of a flickering flame, as though he’d seen something, endured something, had lost that easy sheen Drift remembered.  “We can— _I_ can. If you’ll let me.”  A smile wavered on the jet’s mouthplates, nothing like the easy confidence of before, lit by some hidden need Drift could only guess at.

He thought about it. Drift really did. Primus help him, for a moment, he truly did. Time seemed to sprain itself, stretching long, while he spun out a future that would start with his hand in Wing’s, like this.  And that future seemed like light and brightness and emotions he couldn’t even name, pressing outward on his spark. 

It was too bright, blinding and bursting with hope and after all, he was a creature of shadows and darkness. Light and joy were not for him. Wing was not for him. The hand Wing held was a killer’s hand, a thug’s hand, the body he’d touched a moment before had been touched by a hundred uncaring strangers. Drift was filthy in every way a mech could be, and Wing was almost incandescent and pure. 

He stepped back, almost trembling, shaking his head, trying to pull his hand free of Wing’s. “No. No.” He could hear the fear in his voice, the admission that it was too much, too good for him.  Surrender and cowardice, but he couldn’t stop himself from pedaling backward, twisting out of Wing’s grasp in blind, helpless, humiliated flight.

Fleeing like last time, but there had been a warm bubble of a dream then, a seed of something that might have been.  Nothing like that now, nothing but the raw flayed awareness dogging his footsteps; that it could never be, could never have been, that even a fantasy was beyond him now. 


End file.
